Many different applications employ the use of functional material. Generally, this functional material needs to contact the material of interest (e.g., reactants, analytes, etc.) to be active. Particularly, if a solid support was desired, the functional materials were added to the solid support, but many remained inaccessible due to the fact that most were embedded into the solid support material fully encasing the functional material or were not in an active enough state due to other reasons (agglomeration, change in chemical state, or both).